The Contemporary Complaint
The modern age seems to have a problem with solitude. We are constantly distracted and bombarded by technological innovations, apps, and gadgets that entice and preoccupy our minds. And yet the modern person—or I should say, the modern patient—has become increasingly aware of their own addiction to this plethora of things.
People often complain of losing hours to mindless scrolling—surrendering to what they call the rabbit hole, feeding what neuroscience has dubbed the lizard brain, and emerging from the stupor with little to show but guilt. This complaint has become one of the most recurring themes in the analytic space today. There is an implicit assumption alongside it: that if one understands one's own neurosis, or some low-level addiction, one can simply exercise willpower and resist the pull.
Some very creative and disciplined people—those who can organize their lives and remain productive—have surprisingly little awareness of how they spend their after-hours. They often claim to be too tired to engage with something meaningful: a serious book, a conversation of depth, or, as I sometimes suggest, simply doing nothing.
Doing nothing, when explored in analysis, frequently evokes an extreme fear. People call it anxiety, but beneath it lies something older—a fear that stillness will unravel into something destructive for their life and survival.
The Ancient Precedent
With this in mind, let us turn to the past and consider how the people of antiquity dealt with solitude. What we find there is striking: solitude was often regarded as a special endeavor, even a sacred one. People were busy then as now—consumed by practical concerns, by survival, by the rhythms of daily life. Whether in the past, with its scarcity of resources, or in the present, with its overwhelming abundance, solitude has remained in deficit. It is longed for, complained about, and—continually avoided.
Solitude in its rawest form is perhaps best exemplified in the lives of the Desert Fathers—those monastic ascetics of early Christianity who chose to live between the sands, whether we understand those as the sands under the burning sun or the sands of time. Among them were figures such as St. Anthony the Great, who retreated into the Egyptian desert for decades of solitary combat with his own inner demons; St. Paul of Thebes, considered the first Christian hermit; and Abba Moses, whose sayings on stillness and interior silence have endured for seventeen centuries. That kind of monastic life was among the harshest imaginable, requiring profound loneliness, separation, and isolation.
How is it that solitude was so difficult then—and remains so difficult now? I am not suggesting we compare the modern person with an ancient saint in terms of lived experience. Rather, I want to understand what it is about solitude that seems to require extremes in order to bring about spiritual awakening. That, in fact, is precisely why we are all running from it.
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